Written on the Skin
by chezchuckles
Summary: It's just a scar. It doesn't mean anything. COMPLETE Spoilers for oblique allusions to season 3 finale, and maybe some of season four. Second chapter due to popular demand.
1. Chapter 1

**Written on the Skin**

* * *

><p>"The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been."<p>

— Jodi Picoult

* * *

><p>She doesn't get what everyone's so worried about. Not at first. It's just a scar. She has plenty. A chunk taken out of her side when she was nine or so and fell against a swingset's uncapped screw. The criss-crossing ridges on her knees from girls' lacrosse practices, back when they never forced the team to use knee pads or elbow pads or helmets during scrimmage games. A gash at her upper thigh where she narrowly avoided severing an artery on the blade of a meth-head during her stint in Vice.<p>

If someone stays on her skin long enough, they will be able to connect the dots of her history, scar by scar. They tell a story, if someone is patient enough to read them.

If not, it hardly matters. Lacross and a knife's edge, swingsets and a bullet. They aren't the same words, but they mean the same things.

Josh was so concerned about the scar, kept reassuring her that they did the best they could to keep the tissue damage minimal, to keep the incisions small. He said it so much that Kate began to think *he* had the problem with it and was projecting on her. Eventually, it had nothing to do with Josh anymore, and whatever he might read into her scar held no importance to Kate.

Everyone scars. Scars are nothing. Wedges of skin that don't smooth out. She doesn't think about it. She doesn't have room.

All Kate Beckett has room for is determination. The determination to walk without trembling, to get off the pain medicine, to sit up on her own, to no longer be in pain. She concentrates on the pain and uses her force of will to detach herself, to become an observer to the agony as it lances through her body.

For the most part, that works.

Kate Beckett progresses, slowly; she heals. The pain, they determine, is mostly psychosomatic, so Kate goes to therapy twice a week until it longer feels like she's being branded, until the burn of her bullet-scorched flesh finally cools. Still, late at night, she wakes to a sound like ripping paper and feels her sternum cracking apart, her skin shredding, the scar inflamed and pulsing.

She pushes back the sheets and lays there for a moment, mind whirling. It's a nightmare, of course, and she's had plenty in her life. She usually doesn't even remember the actual events of her dreams, just the feeling when she wakes.

This one is special; this one remains in vivid, lurid detail just inside her eyelids, ready to fall over her again when she finally gets to sleep. It will be there in the darkness if she lets herself drift off again.

When the phantom pain of a searing bullet begins to fade, recede like the tide, Kate turns her head and glances to her alarm clock on the bedside table.

At four in the morning, no one else is awake. So she slides her fingers over the phone and cradles it for a moment, not truly debating with herself, just waiting for the ripeness of the moment.

She presses two and speed dials him, all without thinking, without wondering.

His voice is warm and rich and raw on other end. "Kate."

When she calls him, he always answers with her first name, rather than his own, rather than Beckett. Rather than not answering at all, a phone call from her a four a.m.

"Couldn't sleep?"

She hums agreement and sighs. "Same dream."

"It's not true, you know."

"I know."

"Doesn't help?"

"No. . .not really." As he well knows.

"Need me to come over? Prove it to you?"

Yes.

But she does try, every day she tries to keep it back, hold it in. She tries to make it on her own during the daylight hours, when everyone can see her face, read her signs, but her determination has deserted her in the darkness. She knows that his daughter is upset with him for refusing to give Kate up. She knows that Martha insists he has worked his last case, that it's too dangerous. She knows that the new Captain disapproves of civilian consultants.

She also knows that Castle has refused to abandon her, refused to give up his Muse. She also knows she's still on leave, and it's four in the morning, and she keeps dreaming this dream.

"I'm already in the elevator, Kate."

Too late to say no. Right?

"Tell me a story," she says finally, curling up on her side now that the lancing pain in her chest has kept it down to a dull roar.

"Fiction or nonfiction?"

She closes her eyes, feels the heaviness descending but tries to fight it off. "Nonfiction."

"Ah, really? Okay. Give me a second to think."

She knows there are stories he wants to avoid. He won't bring up his daughter anymore, won't mention his mother all that often either. Josh never enters into it, just as he didn't enter into it when he was still a page in her book.

"How about an embarrassing story from boarding school?"

"Okay," she murmurs, keeping the phone close to her ear, her arm barely able to hold it up.

"Don't fall asleep on me, Kate."

"Trying not to."

"If I get all the way to your door, and you're asleep-"

"Won't happen," she answers. "And if I am, come in anyway. You have a key."

"I do," he says warmly. "All right then. Boarding school."

"Little Rick Castle in boarding school. Aw," she hums, and she hears it, she really does, but she can't help it. All her old determination has deserted her.

"Not so little. Thirteen."

And then he tells her the story.

* * *

><p>When Castle creeps into her bedroom, the light is still off and the bedside clocks now reads closer to five. She blinks and pulls her phone away from her ear, sees that it is dark.<p>

"You fell asleep," he whispers and crawls into bed behind her. He takes the phone out of her hand and leans over her to drop it on her bedside table.

She lays there as he arranges himself, so carefully, and she waits for her awareness to come sliding in. When it does, she smiles and turns onto her back, her hand out. Castle's warm palm meets hers, the heel of his hand at her wrist, his fingers lacing through hers. Warm and solid and alive.

"I'm not shot, Kate," he says gently.

"I know."

"I'm not dying."

"I know."

"I won't leave."

She's silent for a long time, examining the truth of the statement that wants to come out of her mouth. She has to probe it with her tongue for weakness, has to work her jaw around it. And then:

"I know."

He sighs and slides closer, bring a knee up. She feels his knee nudge her calf and she holds out for a minute, thinking maybe that all it will take on her side of things is a moment where she doesn't give in, doesn't surrender, and it will go back to what it was, where it was.

But that's impossible, and she turns on her side towards him, letting his knee slide between her legs, letting her other hand rest against the short bristles on his jaw, his neck, her thumb tugging on his bottom lip. She touches him as if she can read the five o'clock shadow of his cheeks and decipher his meaning. A blind woman searching.

"Kate."

"I know."

She still holds outs, thinking it's better if she does, thinking that she's got to be her old self again someday, in the near future no less, but even as she lets her thumb trace his lip, she's arranging herself around him, orienting to him like a plant to the sun.

"It's okay," he says finally, and that's her sign.

Kate leans in, letting her forehead rest against his on the pillow, the night's terror already fading, the dream slipping in and out of his story, in and out of time, in and out of the touch of their hands.

She kisses that bottom lip first, tasting it, using her fingers as guidance. Castle rolls closer, pulls their laced hands against his chest as he part his mouth for her.

This time, she lets his hand go so she can slide her fingers across his jawline, into the soft hair, curl around his ears. She lets his hand go, and he understands it for what it is, and he uses the moment to reach out and touch the fragile, hard line of her sternum, and then down.

He traces a path to her waist, then slips his fingers under her shirt, his palm warm and broad and lazy against her skin, slowly reading what's written there, the story of her ribs, her heart, her chest.

She closes her eyes, remembers that it's already dark in her bedroom, and opens them again.

Now she knows, now she understands why everyone made such a fuss.

She wishes, half-heartedly, that on their first case together, when she had sauntered up to him and said, "Oh, you have no idea," that she had also added, "But would you like to find out?"

She wishes he had seen her then, unmarred and whole-hearted. She's not worried about it, not concerned with the way she looks; it is just a scar.

But she wishes she had offered herself to him before, wishes for those years back, so that this time, when he slides his fingers up and meets the puckered, puffy edge of the bullet's entry, he would have something to compare it to, something clean, a blank page where now she's been written on.

She's supposed to be a one-writer girl.

"Thank God," he reads, and his mouth is so close to her ear that his words feel like a kiss to her wildly beating heart, her poor, recently mended heart. His fingers slip along the line of it, his body moving closer to hers, until she is moving against him, every slide of her thigh, every brush of her arm.

"You're alive," he reads, and even as he does, it feels like his fingers etch new lines into her skin, slowly, rhythmically, tracing out and down and around and away. She feels herself arch into him, unable to help herself, an open book.

"Love you," he reads, and the words sink through the fog of nightmare and cleave the not-true from the true, until it is just him, just Rick Castle, and the certainty that he will always know how to read her, no matter what's written there.

His hand lays flat against the scar; the scar seems to pulse with her erratic heartbeat, both anticipation and acceptance, the beginning of their story and the end. "It's okay. This is us."

He's right. It doesn't matter, the scar. If she'd taken him out for a spin on their first case, she would've returned him to the dealer, gone for a cheaper model. If she'd let him into her heart, shown him her skin, he'd have no idea what to do with it back then; he would've tried to fill her up, scribbled over her blank page, marred the beautiful lines now written between them.

It was only now that would ever work. It had only ever been now.

"Stay," she says. "Let me tell *you* a story."


	2. Chapter 2

"No!"

It's the cracking of his own voice that wakes him this time. Heart pounding, soaked in sweat. Black darkness, so deep it grows eyes and mouths. He lets out an involuntary sob, presses both hands to his face, tries to shake it free.

The darkness is no help, but he can't find a way to make his legs work.

The way her blood dripped from the gurney as they rolled her through the hospital corridors and into emergency surgery, the tracks the wheels made in her blood, dark lines.

The lines running back to him, the stickiness under his shoes. He still has those shoes, hasn't cleaned them. Can't bring himself to touch them.

As always, Lanie's breaking voice in his head: _Katie, don't die on me. Do *not* die_. But there was no authority, only desperation.

And all the things Castle wanted to say and couldn't, they jam in his throat, stuck. His mouth clogged with the sight of her blood just running out, like an overflowing cup, spilling out along the floor. One arm flopped carelessly to the side, her own finger providing the channel for the river of her blood to waterfall over the gurney and onto the floor-

Oh God.

He's calling her before he can stop himself.

He sits up, knows he's waking her, but not able to stop, the phone pressed too tightly against his ear, his breathing still ragged.

"H'lo?"

"I'm coming over." He doesn't recognize his own voice.

"Mm, bring your key."

"Yeah." He hangs up, slides his feet to the floor, pushes out of bed. He licks his lips to get rid of the dry taste in his mouth, rubs a hand over his face again.

He shouldn't. He really should call her back and tell her never mind.

He can't. He can't. God, he can't.

He sneaks out of his loft, locks the door behind him. He thumbs Kate's key in his palm, tries to let the cool metal soothe him with promise. It heats slowly under his grip, becomes sweaty.

He drives. Not a cab. He needs to concentrate on something other than the way he saw the lights go out in her eyes, the hunched figure of Lanie pounding at Kate's chest so hard he was sure she was breaking ribs, the cracking, terrible voice as she begged Kate, begged Kate the way he couldn't beg her-

Oh God, he can't. He can't.

He leans forward in the driver's seat, trying to breathe, swallowing it down, his hands gripping the wheel, knuckles blanched.

Doesn't even know what time it is. Dashboard clocks says 1:13. Takes him a second to figure out what that means. Morning. Early then. Early yet. He's come crawling into her bed at all hours, of course, but not so soon after falling asleep.

He's had very little sleep though.

He meant to write for as long as his eyes would focus, but Alexis had sidetracked him, and then he'd been in that dazed land between the end of a long day and the beginning of a second wind. Only that second wind never materialized, and Castle had slumped into his own bed.

It's just, there are things you can't un-know. Can't un-see. Can't un-happen. Like the trail of blood, like his shoe sliding in it as he jogged after the gurney with Kate's too-white body on it. Like responsibility for opening her up to this all over again, being a nosy bastard who couldn't leave well enough alone.

He's got so much. And then Kate-

The rattle in his chest isn't a sob. It isn't. It's just allergies. And sleeplessness. And a nightmare at one in the morning that he's had so many times it's become a choose your own adventure story.

Tonight's ending was page 52: You realize this woman is the best thing that's ever happened to you, but you've lost her through your own carelessness and insensitivity. You hollow out, stop caring; life becomes meaningless.

That too bright day in the cemetery was too close to the page 52 ending. To the page 13 ending. To the page 39 ending. Not so close to the ending on page 107, in which Kate rises from the dead to eat his brains, but he's also grateful for that nightmare ending too. Because at least when he sees her sloughing towards him, eyes lifeless and hungry, he knows this is a dream.

The ones he can pick out as nightmares are easier to take. It's the ones like tonight, when it stays so on track with the truth, when it just recycles old video, gives him B-roll of blood and an audio track of Lanie's crumbling voice, when just the daytime events themselves make up the stuff of his dreams-

It's hard to remember, in these dark hours, which is the dream. So much of real life was a nightmare, that having Kate alive feels like the unreal event, the thing not to be hoped for.

Oh God. Can't he get there faster?

He parks two blocks away, walks, jogs down to her apartment building. He's got the outside key between his knuckles, jams it home and twists the knob. He shivers, even though it's humid outside, rubs a hand through his hair as he goes through her lobby.

He takes the stairs because her elevator is ancient and requires a daytime patience he doesn't have tonight. He sprints them, breathless, has to will his hands to steady at her front door before he can get the key in the lock.

He breathes in her scent in the foyer, closes his eyes. The place is mostly in darkness; he lets his eyes adjust, makes himself wait. He locks the door behind him.

"Castle?" she calls out, and pads barefoot from the hallway, covering a yawn.

"Go back to bed, Kate," he whispers, but heads straight towards her.

"You need me," she says instead, and opens her arms to him, wraps around him tightly.

Still. This is a dream. Has to be a dream. Kate offering a hug? "This real?"

"Real enough."

He shudders again and he knows that was a sigh of relief - it was not another sob - and that he's got Kate back, he's got her, long and lean in his arms; he's got her. Alive. Blood on the inside where it's supposed to be, nourishing her heart, spreading all along her beautiful limbs.

"Bed?" she murmurs.

Yes. He lifts, pulling her off of her feet for a moment, takes in a long, deep breath as he holds her off the ground. Bed. Yes. He just. . .he just can't move away. Can't.

After a second, she must give up on him, because she wraps her legs around his waist. Her hands frame his face, she strokes her thumbs along the ragged mess of his unshaven face. She presses a gentle kiss to his lips.

"It's okay, Castle."

It's like sleep-walking, and he never wakes up. He obeys her unspoken command though, takes her back towards her room, arms wrapped around her. He blindly lowers them to the edge of her bed, nearly falls because he just about missed it, then regains his balance and leans back even as she chuckles at him.

"Graceful."

"Don't mock me. I'm in pain." He gathers her up on top of him, arranging her just so against his chest.

"You are not in pain. It's all in your head," she shoots back, quoting her therapist no doubt. She drags her lips across his neck and he twitches.

"Of course it's all in my head. It's emotional pain. You've given me baggage."

"I'll make a note of it. Don't get shot in front of Castle. He can't handle it." Her fingers brush against his sides as she raises her arms, crosses them on top of his chest and props her head up so she can look at him.

"That's not funny. That's tempting fate." He wraps both arms around her again, tries to erase a nightmare's worth of damage.

"It's okay," she whispers, most of the teasing gone from her voice.

"It's not," he confesses, despair crackling in his chest cavity, so much he has to close his eyes.

"It will be," she rejoins, but now her hands are moving, her leg sliding between his. She lets her mouth settle at his breastbone, her breath fan across his skin. He gulps in the air around her, desperate for her, shakes a little until it passes.

"It will be," he finally agrees, then turns in the bed to have her lay beside him. He holds her closely still, knowing he needs to let go eventually, but not yet, not yet.

"So that 'will be' is still somewhere in the hazy future?" she whispers, nudging his chin with her nose.

He loosens his hold so she can scoot up a little, so they are face to face, but he just can't stand to not-

"Sorry," he huffs as he tightens his arms and brings her too close again, too close, he knows it is, he just can't stop.

"Which one?" she says finally, her mouth somewhere near the back of his neck. "Which dream was this?"

"The not-so-hazy past."

"Come back to the present then. It's not hazy at all."

"The future is though?" He can't help it. He knows better, in the daylight, than to ask for forever, but in the darkness, in the grip of nightmares that aren't his overactive imagination, that are, in fact, truth. . .

"Richard Castle," she sighs softly, her body still liquid in his arms. "You know better than that."

"I know."

"There's no doubt," she continues, just a soft little murmur at his neck, not even a real conversation, but he wishes-

"I don't doubt you, I just-"

"No, Castle," she says, and this time she pulls her head back, pushes on his chest, makes him give her the space she needs. "No. You're awake; I'm alive. Where do you think you are right now?"

He swallows hard. "In. . .in love with you."

She laughs, a startled laugh, not at all what he was expecting. "Well, okay, I was thinking geographically, but that works." She's giving him an indulgent smile.

That works?

"In your bed," he says slowly, a more likely answer.

"Yeah, you are, aren't you?" Kate, still blurred with her interrupted sleep, the lines of her face soft, leans in and lavishes a string of pearled kisses along his jaw. He forgets how to breathe.

She pulls back, further now, his arms looser. She watches him; he feels every movement of her body alongside his, awareness stabbing through him.

"You're in my bed, and did I kick you out?"

"No."

"You're in love with me and did I kick you out?"

He chokes on a breath; he hasn't heard the word out of her mouth. "No?"

"No."

This is an adventure he hasn't chosen. This is something new.

A kiss to his chin. "Do you know why, Castle?"

"No?"

Her eyes are nearly too much. He wants to bury his face in her neck and not look.

"Castle," she admonishes him. "Where am I?"

Okay, um, it's really too late at night for thinking like this. Where all the words mean something. He needs preparation, or a cheat sheet.

"In your bed?"

She gives him a _good boy_ look and strokes her hand over his cheek.

A kiss to the corner of his mouth. "And where else am I?"

His mind blanks, because. . .because. . .

"In love with you," she offers, and her whole face is too much, too much for him- "That's where I am."

"You're in love with me," he repeats dumbly, the whole thing washing over him as he stares at her.

"I think, Castle, if we're both here now, then where we'll be in that hazy future is most likely-"

"Together," he finishes. He knows. Now. Even with the darkness. "We'll be together."

She smiles at him, brilliant and diamond hard, her eyes cutting right through what little emotional control he might have had tonight.

And then she puts her mouth on his skin, works her way to his ear. "Do I need to say it again?"

"Yes."

"I'm in love with you."

"I could hear it again."

She chuckles, the reverberations make his toes curl, his body arch into her. She bites down on a gasp; he can feel her teeth close to his skin.

"I'm in love with you."

He nods yes, realizes she's closer to him now than when he was dragging at her with his arms; all of her own free will, she's so much closer, her body giving over her secrets-

This, this is the ending he's been trying to choose, all this time. He wants to stay forever on this page.

She sighs. "That's where I am. Where I've been. Where I will be, Castle. Always."


End file.
